This post includes an excerpt from chapter 10, which gives comprehensive information on how to acknowledge, recognize, and respond to the tenth step in the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease: more frequently going back in time (long-term memories) and losing connection with the present (short-term memories and recognition of loved ones).

This chapter discusses why this step occurs and offers practical, real-time, and loving ways we as caregivers should respond and help our loved ones as we negotiate this step in the journey.

“The next step in the journey with our loved ones with dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease can be difficult to comprehend and adjust to, since it usually appears randomly and unexpectedly. This step is where our loved ones seem to frequently go back in time in memories, in conversations, and in thinking and they often don’t recognize us or know who we are.

I first read Katherine Anne Porter’s The Jilting of Granny Weatherall in high school. It is the story of an 80-year-old woman who has dementia and/or Alzheimer’s Disease. Neither of these names for neurological impairment existed, however, when Porter wrote this short story in 1930. Instead, elderly people were just ‘senile.’

The story made a strong impression on me even as a teenager, even though I never had steady and intimate contact with elderly people (both my parents lost their parents when they were very young and, as only children who were much younger than their cousins, had no aunts and uncles except one on my mom’s side left by the times we kids came along) and had never seen anything that looked like dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

I found Granny Weatherall fascinating and I found the juxtaposition of where she was in her own mind versus what was actually going on around her intriguing.